February 17, 2005

Nazis In Your Town

I grew up on the south shore of Long Island (they capitalize it there: South Shore), in a blue-collar Suffolk County town: Lindenhurst (formerly Breslau. changed in 1891 by the town elders). The German-American Bund marched through Lindenhurst in 1937. There's no discussion of how they were received but I'd guess it wasn't with derision and anger.

The Bund was big business, spending good American dollars with local merchants and vendors. In Yaphank, where they set up a rural retreat - Camp Siegfried(after the Aryan warrior of myth ) - they'd meet every Sunday: thousands of German-Americans from as far as Ohio, riding the train out from Penn Station to enjoy the fresh air, engage in outdoor activities, eat picnic lunches and consort free of mongrel races.

New Jersey had its own retreat: Camp Norland, in Sussex County. Howsabout your town? Nazis? Klan? Who are YOUR hometown racists?

Comments

Thanks for bringing up the forgotten history of the German-American Bund, Chris. The leader of it was a fellow named Fritz Kuhn, who led the 25,000 member organization and was good buddies with fellow American Nazis Henry Ford, Charles Lindburgh and Father Coughlin. He even held a massive rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939, in favor of keeping the US out of WW2.

Kuhn was eventually convicted of larceny and deported to Germany in 1945. In 1948, the Germans convicted him of trying to transplant Nazism to the United State and for having close ties to Hitler. He was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor. (There is another Fritz Kuhn alive today, but he is a member of Germany's Green party).

I just read Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America," which is about a fictional Nazi takeover of the US, and there was a batch of Bund references throughout, which picqued my interest.

My grandmother was no champion of tolerance, but the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the Sixties freaked her out. She recalled when the Klan was a national organization in the 1920's & 30's with a membership in the millions, a hooded parade proudly marching up Pennsylvania Ave. in D.C. & in Jersey the Klan was powerful enough to influence politics & the legal system (see Willian Kunstler's classic crime book, "The Minister & the Choirgirl").#3 on the Klan hate list, after blacks & Jews were ....Roman Catholics like grandma. The Klan held burning cross rallies at what is now Galloping Hill Golf Course in Kenilworth, & the organization was especially brazen in Central Jersey, south of New Brunswick.

True about the Klan's Central Jersey activity. I remember the Klan leaving business cards on cars in Old Bridge, NJ, a few towns over from me - and that was relatively recently, sometime in the '80s. Freaked me out.

The towering Robert Moses bio "The Power Broker" has some interesting early L.I. history in it. Apparently Suffolk County was a hotbed of Klan activity in the early 20 c. I've been meaning to do more research on the subject ever since reading that.

We've all probably spent a bit too much time listening to "*The Mighty Wurlitzer*" but the reality and the well-hidden history about the Nazi's influences on major US corporations - AND THE PEOPLE WHO OWNED AND OPERATED THEM - those facts are JUST NOW beginning to surface - like a bloated, rotting corpse - from the clammy depths of a dark, cold lake.

The History Channel is currently working on a new documentary film, based on a very rare book (about historical events in 1930's America) by Jules Archer named "The Plot to Seize the Whitehouse". The new History Channel feature will also including over 6,000,000 documents and records of never-before publicized evidence, (like photographs and business documents) which were released by President Clinton's 1998 executive order - he freed all of the info about our secret Nazi intelligence agents - the ones we recruited and (with the help of the Vatican) saved from the noose at the end of WWII - by quietly sliding them down "the Rat Line" to South America.

It sucks but it's true --> Our collective history has been (Sean) "Hannitized" - for Our Protection!

I wrote the rough draft of a novel last year involving the Holocaust and the Cold War. In the rewrite I decided to set a number of chapters in the German American Bund of the 1930s. Which is how I happened upon this place in a search for Camp Siegfied. What I'd really like is info on Camp Nordlund but nothing came up on that one.

Much of my childhood, late fifties through the sixties, was spent living in Commack, Long Island. We moved back and forth between there and Brooklyn. After much travelling I currently live in Central New Jersey, so the areas these things were set in is fairly familiar to me.

Thanks for the information you've posted and I'm looking forward to reading more on this subject.